University of Neuchâtel & Witwatersrand

Quick and Dirty Covid-19 Online Surveys: Why?

Everyone seems to be an epidemiologist these days. I have long lost count on the surveys that land in my inbox. It’s clear that the internet has made it very cheap to field surveys, especially surveys where questions of sampling don’t seem to be relevant to those fielding the surveys. It’s also clear that tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics make it easy to field surveys quickly. But that’s no excuse for some of the surveys I’ve seen:

surveys with no apparent flow between questions

surveys where the e-mail makes it clear that they are desperate to get any answers

surveys that throw in about any instrument that could be vaguely related to how people respond to Covid-19 (with no apparent focus; which is bound to find ‘interesting’ and statistically ‘significant’ results)

double negatives in questions

two questions in one

For example, how should I answer this required question at the bottom here? What if I assume corruption is evenly spread across all sectors, or not present at all?

I understand that we want to get numbers on the various ways Covid-19 affected us, but with surveys like these we’re not going to learn anything because they do not allow meaningful inferences. In that case, it’s sometimes better not to run a survey then pretending to have data.